by Lauryn April
“Thanks anyway, Charlie.” I offered her a wan smile. “Thanks for trying.”
I’m really sorry. I’ll try and look them up as soon as I can.
I nodded. “Well, I’ll see you later then,” I said.
“Bye Ivy… Brant.” She waved and we turned and started to walk out.
Wait, she then thought and I stopped and glanced back at her over my shoulder. Meet me after class, by the west entrance again. I’ve got an idea for something that might help. I nodded then Brant and I left the library.
Outside our Psych room, Brant and I paused to talk in the hallway. He glanced around as if worried that someone were planning to listen in on our conversation then he turned his eyes back to me. I knew I had to fill him in on a few things. He hadn’t heard what Charlie had been thinking. For an instant, his face was taut with frustration and possibly annoyance. I realized that standing there while Charlie talked to me through her thoughts, to him, must have felt like listening in on a conversation in another language.
“So, what’s the rest of the story?” he asked.
“Computers are going to be down for a while.”
Brant shook his head. “We’re running low on time. Two weeks from Monday we need to have this all figured out or our graduating classes are going to get a lot smaller.”
“Yeah, I know… Charlie thinks she has an idea though. We’re supposed to meet her after class.”
He nodded. “Well, let’s hope it’s a good one then.”
17
How to Make a Bomb
After class, Brant and I walked out of the west entrance to find Charlotte waiting for us. Her fingers were picking at her nails, chipping away the cracked blue polish. She smiled at us as we walked out the door, her expression bright with nervous excitement. I watched as she shifted her weight from one hip to the other, turning out her blue Chuck Taylors so I could see the corners of a big star on the high-tops peeking out from beneath her jeans. Her enthusiasm was like the bubbles in a boiling pot of water, ready to spill over onto the stovetop at any moment.
“Hey guys.”
“Hey… so, what’s this idea you’ve got?”
Charlie seemed to suddenly flush with confidence. “Okay, so I was thinking… gasoline, bleach, gun powder… all common bomb building ingredients, right? None of them hard to get one’s hands on… but if this guy wants to blow up the whole school, he’s gonna need a lot of them.”
“You wanna try and figure out if anyone’s been buying bomb building ingredients in bulk?” Brant asked.
“That’s a good idea,” I said, “but where do we start? I mean no place is just going to give us their credit card receipts and say ‘here you go’.”
Charlie was smiling, a large self-assured grin stretched across her face. “Not unless you have access to them yourself.”
Olsen Hardware was the only hardware store in town, and it just so happened that Charlotte Olsen’s father owned it. It was possible that whoever was planning to blow up the school had gone to the Wal-Mart just outside of town, but Olsen’s would have been the closest and most convenient place to get any bomb building ingredients. As we all drove there in my Scion, I hoped that this would give us the lead we so desperately needed. I hoped, whoever this person was, that he had already bought what he needed to build this bomb, and that he had done so at Olsen’s.
Brant and I stood behind Charlie as she typed away on her father’s computer. We were all huddled in his small windowless office at the back of the store. It was hot in the small space, and smelled like sawdust and fresh cut wood. I cast a nervous glance at the door. Its green paint was chipping and exposed the silvery metal underneath. I was worried that someone would walk in before we had the information we needed.
“So what if they paid in cash?” Brant asked.
“Then we’re out of luck,” Charlie responded. The tapping of her typing reverberated in the room, becoming an obnoxious and relentless sound. It made me nervous.
“Let’s just hope they didn’t do that… although there aren’t too many kids at our school with credit cards.”
“More than you’d think” Charlie said, “and it wouldn’t have to be a credit card. Lots of kids have check cards or debit cards.”
I nodded in agreement because I had a debit card. After that I just hoped that whoever this person was that they were stupid enough to leave a paper trail.
“Okay, found one.”
“What is it?”
“Mrs. Pople apparently bought six large gas cans last week.”
“There’s a Nick Pople at our school, he’s a senior.” Brant said.
“Oh and Robert Maclin, Robb M, bought three containers of bleach less than a week ago. That’s a lot of bleach for a high school kid.”
“My mom’s had the same container sitting under our kitchen sink for over a year,” I said.
Charlie kept scrolling through the files on her dad’s computer. Every time she found something that sounded suspicious, I wrote down the name. Anyone who either went to our school or was the parent of someone at our school that bought something like propane or fertilizer was written down, especially if they bought such items in large amounts. The only problem was that we had no idea what kind of bomb this person was planning to build, and we had no idea if the propane tanks that Mr. Davis bought were for his son’s explosive endeavor or for a backyard barbeque this weekend. In the end, we had a list of about ten people that seemed most suspicious. Ten was an easier number than what we were dealing with before, but it still didn’t seem small enough. Especially since it was possible that whoever was planning this wasn’t even on our list.
“Sorry, guys,” Charlie said as we exited the hardware store, “I thought that would be a little more telling.”
“It was a good idea,” I said, squinting into the afternoon sun. “And it does help. At least it gives us ten people that we should look at before anyone else.”
“We need to get a look at those book rentals,” Brant added.
Charlie dug her hands deep into the pockets of her zip up. “The school flags all Internet searches on stuff like bombs too, I can look at those. I just need the servers to come back up.”
“Why don’t they just block sites like that?” I asked.
“In case someone’s doing a report or a speech on that stuff.”
“That makes sense.”
“So, what now?” Brant asked.
Charlie shrugged. “Food?”
There was a Subway on Fifth Street. As I drove us there, I gave my mom a quick call. I told her that I’d stayed after class to catch up on homework from skipping school and that I would be getting a quick bite to eat with friends before coming home. She was glad to have me check in, but seemed somewhat concerned when she asked if I was out with Christy and Tiana and I told her that I wasn’t. I hadn’t told her yet that I was no longer hanging out with them. I imagined her wondering if I’d fallen in with a new crowd, a bad crowd. And the truth was that maybe I was hanging out with a new crowd, but they weren’t a bad one. I was starting to like Charlie, and Brant was good company. Maybe a bad influence in the way that he was part of the reason why I skipped school earlier in the week, but it was for a good reason. Also he stood up for me when Craig Fister started to get too pushy and creepy, and he was a good listener too, much better then Christy had ever been.
We sat down at a table near the window to eat our subs.
“So, what are we gonna do with this guy when we do find him?” Charlie asked.
“Try and reason with him,” I said as I unwrapped my sandwich from its paper constraints, “tell one of the teachers about him, the police.”
“Why don’t we just do that now? I mean we could say that we know someone is planning something, like an anonymous tip or something. Or, since we know when this is going to happen, we could just call in a bomb threat on that day. They’d evacuate the school.”
“Can’t,” Brant said, “it’s too hard to do anything anonymously anymore,
they can track calls, look up phone numbers, and they’d probably think we were involved just for suggesting it. Same with calling in a bomb threat, that’s the best way to be suspect number one. It’d be different if we had a way to explain how we know what we know, but we can’t… Once we know who it is then at least we can lie, say we overheard him talking about something, though that’s not the best excuse.”
“People probably say they’d like to blow up the school just about every day,” I said, “doesn’t mean they actually plan to.”
“Right, so we need some proof, and good reasons to explain why we’re not involved. I’m just hoping that’s easier to figure out than who this guy is.”
Our conversation quieted down for a short while as we ate. Homicidal teens were no match for hungry bellies. When you’re seventeen, food wins out over serious conversation every day. After a short while though, Charlie’s questioning picked up again.
“Who do you think it is?” Charlie asked.
“Hopefully someone on our list,” Brant responded as he took a bite of his sandwich.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It could be anyone. Could be someone we see every day. Someone who’s gone to school with us for years that we just never noticed, never paid any attention to… or maybe we did notice them, maybe it’s someone I’ve picked on, or you.” I looked at both Charlie and Brant, “Or someone who’s been picked on and we just stood by and watched… Whoever they are, they feel this way because of us, because of people at our school. It makes me feel kind of sorry for them.”
Charlie nodded in agreement.
“Not me,” Brant said, “I don’t feel sorry for anyone who’s trying to kill me. Everyone gets picked on, we all feel alone sometimes. I don’t care if you’re Eric Thompson or Christy Noonan, we all feel alone, feel left out, looked down on. Everyone gets talked about behind their back, but we don’t all go out on killing sprees. Whoever this guy is, whatever he’s been through, that doesn’t make what he’s doing right.”
He took another bite of his sub and I let his words soak in. I thought about what it would take to drive me to kill someone, thought about what someone would have to say to me or do to me to push me to the point where I wanted them dead. I couldn’t come up with anything. I understood what Brant was saying. Being picked on didn’t excuse whoever this was, he was still responsible for what he was doing.
My mind mulled over Brant’s words, but then the sight of something across the street jostled me free of them. My eyes became cemented to the window; my sub sandwich was momentarily forgotten. Across the street was Oregano’s Pizzeria, and standing outside its doors were Christy and Chase. He was twisting a piece of her blonde hair in his fingers and she was looking at him with the brightest grin.
“Ivy, you alright?” Brant asked me and my eyes snapped back to him.
I watched as he looked out the window to see Christy and Chase.
Charlie was looking that way as well. “You’re friends with her, yeah?” Charlie asked me.
“Not anymore… least I don’t think so.”
I wonder why, she thought but she didn’t voice the question aloud. For that, I was grateful.
She’s still caught up on that tool, Brant thought. His eyes were glaring out the window. I just don’t get it.
“So, what are you guys doing this weekend?” Charlie asked and I was glad for the change in subject. I didn’t like the fact that it bothered me that Christy and Chase were seeing one another, but I couldn’t help the fact that it still stung.
“I’m going shopping with my mom tomorrow after school,” I said. “You wanna come with us?”
“No, thanks, but I’ve got a thing… I teach guitar lessons to a few kids in the grade school Friday afternoons. Maybe another day this weekend?”
“Yeah, that’d be fun. I don’t have any plans for Saturday, what about you Brant?”
“I’d be up for something.”
“Here, lemme get your number,” Charlie said pulling her phone from her pocket. I did the same. As I told her my number, Brant grabbed my phone and began to type his number into it. I didn’t mind. As he did, though, I listened in on his thoughts and they weren’t about me.
Guitar lessons, hmm. I’ll have to see if the girl can really play.
I felt a sinking sensation in my belly. It wasn’t that I liked him; I shouldn’t have been bothered if he was expressing interest in someone else. And it wasn’t that he was even doing that. He played guitar, it was only natural that he’d be interested in the fact that Charlie played too. For a second then, I thought about asking Charlie to teach me how to play something.
“Alright, I’ll text you,” Charlie said and went about typing in her phone. While she did, Brant slid my phone back to me. A moment later, my phone lit up with her text message and I saved her number.
“Well, we should probably get going,” Brant said.
We were all finished eating and left shortly after that. I dropped the both of them back off at school and went home for a quiet night to myself.
18
You Learn a lot from Listening
That night, as I was lying in bed, I found it hard to fall asleep. I twisted and turned, flipping from one side of the bed to the other. My sheets got caught around my ankles, winding into knots. I tried sleeping on my back, then my side. Nothing felt comfortable. My queen-sized bed suddenly felt too big for me. It was like I was swimming in a sea of blankets. I had always liked to spread out as I slept and usually took up all available mattress real estate, but that night I felt like no matter how I laid nothing felt right. It felt cold and empty as if I was lying on the immense, bare surface of the moon.
Turning on to my side again, I spied my phone sitting on my side table. It was plugged into the charger and blinked a tiny green light at me. I stared at it for a moment then shut my eyes, but I could still feel the illumination of its green light against my eyelids. My eyes snapped open and I rolled onto my back, then with a sigh I grabbed my phone off the nightstand.
I began scrolling through my contacts, and stopped when I came to ‘Brant Everett’. I paused for a moment, looking down at my screen which had his name lit up. I realized then that I had his number, but he didn’t have mine. I almost set my phone back on the nightstand and tried to force myself to sleep again, but I didn’t. I clicked his name and typed a text message.
‘Hey, this is Ivy,’ I typed. My finger hovered over the send button for what seemed like an hour. Finally, I hit send. I set my phone back on my nightstand and turned onto my side and tried to sleep. Just because I messaged him didn’t mean he’d respond. After a few minutes, though, I heard the low buzzing that was my phone on vibrate. I turned over and grabbed it. Lying on my side, I looked at the message.
‘Hey, what r u up 2?’ his message read.
‘Nothing, can’t sleep, you?’ I responded then left my phone beside me in bed.
After a few moments, it lit up again.
‘Nm, was playing guitar.’
‘What can you play?’
‘Lots, I’ll play u something sometime, u play anything?’
I thought for a moment. Mom tried to get me into piano lessons when I was younger but it hadn’t stuck. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Maybe I’ll teach u something.’
When I got that text, I felt the iconic butterflies return to my stomach. It was that feeling of being so excited that you were short of breath, a giddy tingling feeling deep down in the pit of my belly. The butterflies fluttered about, and finally I realized that I kind of liked Brant Everett. I liked him in a way I never thought I would. We texted back and forth for some time after that. I told him about how my dad still wasn’t talking to me, and he told me that his dad’s business trip was getting extended. As we texted, I finally felt my body relax. Sleep finally sounded like a place I could reach, but as we talked, the last thing I wanted to do was to end our conversation. As it got later, however, I found my eyelids growing heavy and the need to sleep starting to overcome
my want to text.
We finished talking about what music was currently in our iPod playlists, his being a mix of alternative rock including bands like The Calling and The Black Keys. Mine was a mix of classic rock including The Outfield and Bryan Adams. Then we said goodnight and I floated off to sleep with ease.
The next morning at school, I ran into Charlie as I walked onto the common. She and I talked until the bell rang. Mostly our discussion consisted of idle chitchat about what classes we were taking and what we thought of our teachers. I looked around for Brant at one point and saw him standing against the side of the building with Skyler and Jason. Our eyes met for a brief second and he gave me a short wave. I felt the sinking sensation return to my belly that had been there when I heard him thinking about Charlie the other day. It bothered me that he didn’t come over to say hi. I had gotten used to talking with him in the mornings. I suppose I forgot that he had other friends.
Classes went by fast that day and lunch, for once, was just lunch. Brant and I had looked over the list we’d made when we met up halfway through the day, but there weren’t any names that stood out to us. It was hard to know what to do next, who to talk to. We didn’t know where anyone on our list would be during the lunch hour. And, it seemed, no matter how many times my eyes scanned the crowd on the common, I never saw any of the people we were looking for. Those ten people could have been hiding just beyond my sight, or they could have gone out to lunch as a number of them were seniors. Possibly a few of them were in the gym playing basketball. I was pretty sure that at least one of them was on the basketball team, another was a football player. Maybe some of them were in the library, or skipping school. Wherever the ten people on our list were, we didn’t see them, but in truth we didn’t look for any of them very hard.
Brant and I sat down. He’d gotten a small personal pan pepperoni pizza from the lunchroom and a Mountain Dew. I hadn’t made myself a lunch that day so I bought a chicken Caesar wrap and grabbed a bottle of lemonade. We didn’t talk about our texting from the night before, nor did we discuss in any detail the doom that awaited our school in a little over two weeks. Instead we talked about our favorite movies and discovered we both had a love for comedy zombie flicks such as Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. Then we talked for another twenty minutes, discussing if either one of us would survive a zombie apocalypse. I had insisted that I would live longer than Brant since I could use my gift to hear the zombies coming before they got to me. He, however, shot down that idea, arguing that zombies didn’t have thoughts.
